Visual Arts: Since 2003, Sean Tracey House has provided one of the country's more unorthodox exhibition venues, writes Aidan Dunne.
Vacated and increasingly neglected flats in the block have been home to Pallas Heights artists. As a fast-dwindling band of tenants have moved on to new accommodation, the pigeons have moved in, colonising the balconies. Their chicks are comfortably ensconced there now, just as Pallas reaches the end of the line. For its finale, all four flats at its disposal have been pressed into service.
Fergus Byrne has occupied one of them as a studio over a sustained period, so he's gotten to know the area very well. His work, Fiction, based on the view from Sean Tracey House and including narrative accounts of his time there, brings the outside inside in architectonic drawings and a video installation which convey something of his experience of small contained spaces set within large, open, but not necessarily benign spaces. Outside is a hard, worn, abrasive environment, dominated by cement and tarmacadam, though there is an expanse of green and the occasional decorative flourish adjacent to the block, and the south-facing windows offer remarkable views over the city.
Sally Timmons (sharing one flat with Sarah O'Toole and Susan Gogan of the group Via), using a camera obscura with an upper-floor room as her camera, also presents us with the external world in an interior setting. Ifact, an exploration of the ideas of inside as opposed to outside has been a recurrent theme in the work of many of the artists who have exhibited at the flats over the years. The response of people to the anomie and anonymity of contemporary urban life is to turn inwards to virtual worlds of one kind or another, to iPods, computer games, the internet and multi-channel television. This denial of the environment was not what the planners of Sean Tracey House and its companions had in mind, and in their work artists have repeatedly referred to the utopian aspirations of the architects, urban planners and politicians of the time.
Sarah O'Toole's tiny glass house, set inside the living room of one flat, is an idealised image of a home installed in the disintegrating fabric of an actual home. Tattered lace curtains, fragmentarily painted on to a window, subtly reinforce the atmosphere. It is in all a very effective installation that perfectly harnesses and informs the location.
Susan Gogan settles on incongruity, with a photographic image of a picnicking Lolita mysteriously transposed into a spartan industrial interior. A fluorescent strip-light, sited in the room, "creates gaps in the symbolic surface of the image" we are told, because it is physically there and it relates to the lights in the photograph. One can follow the logic, but a little more inventiveness wouldn't go amiss.
Move on to Vanessa O'Reilly's flat and you are greeted by a raw breeze-block wall, from behind which alarming deep bass noises emanate. Upstairs, a portable tape recorder endlessly records and simultaneously erases the current three minutes. A kinetic rope light, in a third room, is arranged to form the word Swarm, which is also the title of the whole ensemble of pieces. Alienation, paranoia and sinister activities are what come to mind in O'Reilly's atmospheric interventions.
That is also the case with aspects of Clodagh Emoe's transformation of her flat for Metaphysical Longings. Therapeutic yoga lessons, held in the living room, are replayed in a rather more chilling setting upstairs. In a scene reminiscent of a Joseph Beuys installation, old metal-framed chairs are crammed into a small bedroom, facing a screen on which the video is projected. Furniture takes on a life of its own. A mood of desolation pervades the final room, in which damp mould and discoloration are relieved only by a poster of a sunlit forest tacked to the wall.
So that's it. No more Pallas Heights. The project was one of the more intriguing off-site ventures that have been attempted in recent years, and it produced some memorable responses from artists, many of whom rose to the exceptional challenges posed by the setting. Because of that setting, the question of art and "the community" inevitably arises. Pallas wasn't community arts, but it was certainly about the community in the widest sense, in addressing issues of urban planning, not to mention the day-to-day experience of living in a contemporary city, for example. The whole programme will in time be documented in a publication.
Pallas Heights originated in Pallas Studios in Foley Street, where the experimental art space, The Lab, is now situated. Currently, the art group, FAF (an acronym that comes with many possible interpretations, including Frivolous Artistic Fancies and Facilitating A Forum), is in residence with Mirroring. There are four participants, and they have produced a thoughtful, if understated, installation.
The most in-your-face element is Ian-John Coughlan's video footage of a tattooist at work, applying part of a formidably involved geometric pattern. It is, we are told, a subcultural activity displayed in a cultural venue but then, let's face it, that is what cultural venues are all about, so there isn't exactly a whiff of the transgressive about it.
Rather more subtly, Barbara Vasic has broken up the gallery space with hanging paper screens, flimsy but imposing divisions. She prompts us to look at ourselves in the space by relaying images from a camera with a wide-angled lens.
In Suzanne Mooney's video piece, a figure (apparently doubled, or mirrored, into two) makes her way perpetually through a wild landscape, hurrying but getting nowhere fast. Sounds of nature, meanwhile, in the form of Linda O'Keefe's birdsong soundtrack, pervade the space. Nothing particularly begins or ends, it's all just there, ongoing. Nothing is strikingly visualised. All of which seems to be part of the plan. But as a strategy it risks leaving its audience indifferent rather than intrigued.
Reviewed
Pallas Heights, Four Shows: Fiction, Fergus Byrne, Flat 25; Metaphysical Longings, Clodagh Emoe, Flat 28; Swarm, Vanessa O'Reilly, Flat 29; Via, Flat 30. All at Sean Tracey House, Buckingham Street, Dublin 1. By appointment until Sat (087-9677394, 087-9572232)
Mirroring, FAF, The Lab, Foley Street, Dublin 1, until Jun 10 (01-2227848)
